5 things that make a good designer great.

1. First off, if you want to have any relevance, you need to develop your personal style. This is where you break through all of the influences upon you and display your personality, idiosyncrasies, your views of what you think is beautiful. James Victore and Stefan Sagmeister are masters at imbuing essence into art. 2. Hear your clients but don’t always listen to them. Clients may know what they want, but not how to get there. Establish yourself as a subject matter expert, and show them your vision of the path towards their final product. Chris Do talks about this a lot. 3. Underpromise and overdeliver. It’s all relative, of course. You always promise and always deliver your highest quality of work. But it can favor you to beat your client’s expectations in terms of quality or in terms of time. 4. Don’t be arrogant. We’re all special and none are special at the same time. If you do your best to fill a client’s need, while also realizing yourself creatively through this process, then you will be special to that client. 5. Try to do work that you love, but also find challenging enough to keep you engaged. A balance between them is what fuels creativity and makes it not just work, but a fun game of life. I leave you with this insightful uttering by Milton Glazer: “You learn more and more that everything exists at once with its opposite, so the contradictions of life are never-ending and somehow the mediation between these opposites is the game of life.”